Quarantine will normalize WFH and recession will denormalize full-time jobs

I don't understand the appeal of doing either full-time. I can see myself being comfortable with a mix of home and office, there are advantages to each in different scenarios.

It's not just tech, lots of jobs are tech adjacent or tech-augmented and can do this. More so than we thought ten years ago.

But in short, it's not for everyone. I'm bored of it. It makes work part of my life one way or another. I like directly interacting other humans sometimes.

There's gotta be a balance, as with most things in life.

Talent outside the bay lags behind so its not as desirable for those companies. Not to mention the valley culture is a bit guild like

Nah, I bet language barriers and substantial time zone difference will keep most companies out of that mix. You'd need to change the company a bit more to accommodate that.

So the value that you get from an expensive engineer can be many number of times the saving. Of course, if a manager under employs an expensive engineer than yes.

Moreover, as engineering tools become better, the better engineer become much more productive, thus magnifying his advantage.

I was talking with someone recently and they were excited to work from home since they bought a new home... so they don't have to work from home from their kitchen table that maybe seats 4 people... maybe.

I think we forget that work from home generally requires some space. Not everyone's home or family situation allows for it.

As someone without kids can you explain this? Where I work at many employees with kids come to work much later and leave much earlier since they have to pick up their kids or send them to after school activities. Wouldn't working from home better this process?

This is a strawman that always appears in every remote work thread and it is always treated at face value: If anyone proposes that they can/should work from home, somehow will reply that everyone can't work from home. Then cue a procession of people giving their tale about how they don't like working from home.

No one is saying, or has ever said, that everyone should WFH. But somehow the notion that some people WFH is threatening to people that don't want to / don't approve of it, and it's always cast in this binary manner. It's a completely dishonest tactic that is boorish.

You say that like outsourcing engineers is a new thing. This has been happening for as long as tech has been a cost center and will continue to happen until U.S. salaries are commensurate with the rest of the world, I don't see why this virus will accelerate the trend any further.

What I hope will happen with this is that companies become a lot more flexible and encourage people who want to to regularly work a few days a week remotely.

For my employees, a lot of them do get more heads-down work done at home. It makes sense for them to work from home when they need intense focus. They also usually do better collaborative work in the office.

I also have employees who really like working remotely and others who really don't like working. I wouldn't want to force people who don't like working remotely to do so.

Some people at my work can walk to work, and coming into the office is an opportunity to interact with other driven people to build great stuff. We shoot the shit, get coffee together, and in general enjoy each other's company. For a lot of employees, coming into the office is something they enjoy.

I don't think anybody is claiming this. The argument is more that WFH is best for people who prefer to WFH and are able to do so effectively.

Last time I checked, most big tech companies have little tolerance for WFH, only allowing workers to WFH at most once or twice per week. There's clearly a middle ground between "no remote workers" and "WFH is the best option for everyone".

What’s wrong with this? I’m one of these engineers in Silicon Valley who would like to live near family. “Half the cost” is still massively higher than the local rate in my home state, which I would happily accept.

That's a fantasy only. The tech giants that are supporting the high salaries can already do all of that. They're not because they can afford to not. They can do max WFH anytime they want to. It is not a first tier concern, it's a third or fourth tier concern, far down the list.

They don't need to hire people for $50,000 instead of $200,000. They need the $200,000 people to keep helping them generate $5b, $10b, $50b per year in operating income. So long as they do, the salaries will remain high. The salary difference on what they could potentially save (and potentially wreck the house instead), is not worth it to do such a major switch.

Microsoft will approximately double in size in the next six or seven years, to $250-$300 billion in sales and $70-$80 billion in operating income. Google and Facebook are in the same growth boat. You think they're so worried about shaving a few pennies of salary cost on those growth machines, that they're going to put their entire systems at risk? No, they won't do that under any circumstance. The only thing they'll do is keep lobbying for importing more tech labor to try to dilute some (they're running the modest risk scenario) and continue to grow outside of SV (and other expensive tech areas like NYC or Seattle) physically as they have been for a long time.

Besides, this assumes that "WFH" will be normalized which I doubt will happen. It will be forced on us, but workplaces are social places just as much as they are places to do work.

Beyond that, this all assumes that SARS-COV-2 is a true epidemic of proportions we haven't seen since the Spanish flu which, despite all the alarmist media, isn't likely. It's good to take all the right precautions, but we aren't living in the early 19th/20th century anymore.

We have modern medicine, proper hygiene, and a much faster rate of information transfer than we ever have before.

If I had office space, yes, I might be dreading the loss.

Society has moved mountains to make work-at-the-office from 9 to 5 (WATO95) possible. It's mind boggling how much society has been bent to pay the _EXTRAORDINARY_ costs of WATO95.

Now, given that society is what it is, right now WATO95 seems cheap. But it really isn't. Some fun facts:

-- the electric car longevity problem --

Electric cars have this giant, unaddressed problem. A normal 'explode dead dinos' style car, even if well engineered, has about a million kilometers tops and then it's just done. Just about every component inside is at the end of its useful lifespan, from the entire engineblock to the wheels (those probably ended earlier), to even the interior; at some point people want a new style.

A well engineered electric vehicle is nothing like this; loads of components (not the batteries or the wheels, but most of the rest) have a lifetime 4x to 10x that easily.

The problem is, an individual car owner is NEVER going to clock that many miles on a car. After 10 years of ownership even if the materials can easily go for another 90, there are newer designs, more comfort, etc.

How do we solve this problem? We could, especially with self driving cars, go to a model where we pool cars: You don't own a car, you just order one, one will drive on its own to your front door within 5 minutes, you use it, and when you're done, it drives off. This pushes utility-per-day up to the levels required to actually use up the components in a 10 year span.

But that is not practical because of WATO95: At about 7am-9am, everybody wants a car, so that whole re-use thing just does not work. We can keep WATO, but then 95 thing has _GOT_ to go; that morning commute needs to be smeared way out; a single car needs to be busy from 5 in the morning to noon bringing at least 4 people to work, hopefully more.

-- traffic jams --

Here in the Netherlands, if ~10% of the workforce does not drive to work at all on any given day, there'd be no traffic jams. As is, there's hundreds of kilometers of traffic jam every workday. How much fuel, and lost hours is that? How many billions upon billions of dollars of value is society throwing down this hole to support WATO95?

-- health --

yeah the corona thing. It's complicated; isolation is very bad for mental health. But is 'drive to the office' (even if we get rid of 95, keep the WATO) the best option? Can we go for an alternative solution with more advanced connectivity (proper video calling, social solutions to staying connected even without an explicit appointment somehow?) Can we move everybody to a '2 days at home, 3 days a the office' model?

The list is way, way longer than this. You're not wrong; working from home as all sorts of major issues, but let's not lose sight of the incredible cost of WATO95 culture either.

+1 its unclear to me why the pricing would go down for higher number of employees? The risk profile is still spread across many people in the case of contractors.

Because the people who keep it that way are the same people you hear say dumb crap like, "I don't want to pay for someone else's healthcare (ignoring the fact that that is the definition of insurance!)" when anyone brings up changing the way healthcare is run in the US of A.

They think only people who work deserve healthcare.

It's tied to employment because we have private health insurance and that doesn't really work without group plans. Employers are the most readily and widely accessible set of groups (unions are another for example).

During World War 2, the US implemented a national wage freeze, with an exemption for insurance and pensions. Since companies still needed to compete for workers, this led to a significant growth in those benefits.

Pre-WW2, many unions in the US had negotiated employer-paid health insurance as a (taxable) benefit. When the government capped wages as part of wartime price controls, these unions threatened to strike, which would have gutted industrial production. To avoid a strike, the government offered to temporarily make employer-provided health insurance a tax-free benefit.

Temporarily. And here we still are.

As a COO, I disagree with every one of those statements.

EDIT: All programming jobs (in my company) are remote capable, and most already are. 95% of my employees use their health benefits.

That basically requires getting rid of private health insurance (except as supplemental insurance) which is going to be a difficult battle.

I don’t think most people prefer to buy health insurance on the individual market.

How did you come to this conclusion, and what do you mean by ‘unused’?

I‘m guessing you mean that a majority of people receiving health care benefits are healthy and thus don’t ‘use’ them enough that the amount of money spent on their health plans is larger than the amount they would spend out of pocket?

Even if that is true, that’s not really the point of insurance. Insurance exists to protect you against an eventuality that you don’t necessarily expect to occur, but would be catastrophic if it did. People don’t buy liability car insurance because they expect to cause a terrible accident and want to come out ahead financially. There is a value to being insured whether or not you have to actively take advantage of the plan.

It didn't even make sense when it started. In the 30s the US government instituted wage controls in a misguided attempt to fight the depression, so because businesses weren't allowed to pay workers more (there was a government-mandated wage ceiling), they started offering health insurance to attract them instead. It's a classic example of the negative second-order effects of economically unsound policy.

I believe versions of this parable you have happen a lot (in both versions), but the ultimate consequences are not exactly obvious. If you play it out the remote scenario over time, then what are the perceptions? Paper trails are dominated by virtual-loudmouth Person A. If anything, A might come out looking like the star of the team. Maybe Person B becomes disengaged and self-select out. Remote teams will start to look like a cult of Person A.

Generationally, forum culture is big. As a millennial, I was in lots of confrontational online discussions as a youth, and enough other people were watching for there to be an audience. The art of flaming involves more emotional intelligence than people give it credit for, it can be similar to traditional debate. Those skills get redirected into the professional world. This is often good for the individual, but bad for the whole. It's pretty to take a healthy online community and convert it into something that only full-time rule junkies can survive in.

If you're ever managing an online community, the most important feedback is what people won't share because of their filter. There are ways to get this information in-person that you lose going full remote.

Protip if this happens:

"You make a lot of good points, and there are some things we should definitely unpack here. Can we dig into this a little over [discourse|slack|phone|video]? We can reply back here later with [action items|a summary of our conversation|specific work items|some actual work] to make sure everyone else on the thread is still included."

Besides:

> Person B uses body language and makes subtle modifications to their response...

This approach is very hit or miss in real life, at least in my experience. Not everyone is wired to respect nonverbal cues as much as we would wish. Instead, I often request a sidebar when in person conversations become derailed.

All that being said, I agree that written communication is challenging for many people, if not most. That is not to say it can't get better if written communication became more important or popular.

I am glad I'm not the only person who does this, though in my case I think it turns out being a little bit of a hindrance. I have a post it note sticking to the bezel of my work monitor that says "STFE" -- (short for, 'send the fucking email') -- because I otherwise I end up with a draft box full of an entire day's emails.

I do, however, take 2 minutes to reduce the number of things I say in an email by answering these two questions in the first two sentences: "What does this person need to know and what decision do I need them to make based on this information?" The rest is basically CYA record keeping.

You need an office to go to so work is isolated from home

It doesn't mean that those employers do not have hordes of office employees.

As a manifestation of the local bubble, all comments I read so far seem to believe that only programmers already spend their day in an office in front of a computer, whereas they are only a very small part of the office workers who could more or less easily switch to Work From Home (and who sometimes already do it).

Mumble, for example, is both excellent in sound quality and FOSS.

I definitely like going to an office more than I like sitting home or at a coffee shop all day. It's important social ambience that I can participate in as much or as little as I want on a given day. And I'm not in the minority, though it can seem so when tolerance for going to a regular job is more implicitly assumed than something that needs to be posted about regularly.

Exactly what I say about my open-office. It's not quiet, and I cannot focus.

If you make the decision to structure the coordination of your business around email instead of meetings, it can have a large effect on your organization's productivity. Depending on how well your employees do with written communication, that large effect can be extremely positive.

Given this, it's perhaps understandable that governments and individuals in the hardest-hit areas would be erring on the side of caution.

I would be way more committed to my job if they gave me the flexibility to work from home.